Perspectives on History – May 2009

Elisabeth Grant |May 12, 2009

The theme of the May 2009 issue of Perspectives on History centers on how new media (web sites, wikis, Google, and more) intersect with history. AHA president Laurel Thatcher Ulrich begins this exploration with her article “Erasing History.” In it she explains how the “digital revolution not only offers new ways of researching and disseminating history… [i]t is also creating new topics for historical inquiry.”

Intersections: History and New Media
Robert B. Townsend introduces the broad array of new media articles in this issue in “Viewing History at the Intersection of Past and Future,” and comments that these “essays consider how the new media of the internet are changing the practice of history in our capacities as scholars, teachers, and general disseminators of knowledge of the past to the general public.”

The essays in this issue take up the theme from different angles. Some ask broad questions and look at how new media affects general concepts (narratives, data) and whole disciplines (public history), while other articles concentrate on specific new media projects and programs.

New Media – Broad Looks
Essays with a broad take on new media include:

Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past
We couldn’t talk about history and new media without talking about the late Roy Rosenzweig. Steven Mintz revisits Rosenzweig’s work and labels him a “torchbearer.”

New Media – Projects and Programs
Sometimes the best way to discuss a topic is to point to concrete examples. The authors of the following articles deconstruct new media projects they’ve been a part of.

The History Engine
A number of articles in this issue address the History Engine, a web site (that we’ve covered on AHA Today in the past) that allows students to create articles in a way that teaches them how to do the work of a historian.